[Dixielandjazz] Lil Armstrong (remark about passport listingdivorce of Lil)

[Charlie Hooks]

PLEASE NOTE: 

This entire discussion seems entirely off-list to me.  But the list is where
it seems to have landed, for whatever reason.  And because my statements are
challenged here, my answers must be listed here.   Please delete at will,
and I'll try not to repeat.

sorry,
Charlie



on 9/30/02 12:15 PM, Rob McCallum at rakmccallum@hotmail.com wrote:

> a back to Africa movement (which, in hindsight, was ludicrous
> because slaves were Americans and NOT Africans by the mid nineteenth
> century)

The Liberian movement was based not on the African nationality of the blacks
but on the necessity of finding someplace that would have them and that
would have some appeal to the blacks themselves.  And tell me: if it was so
"ludicrous," why did so many blacks respond??  Ahh...You aren't serious...

"controversy centers around the idea that slavery would be expanding out of
the South and into the West (making the conflict inevitable)."  Inevitable
only if the South's right to seceed was unlawfully denied (no question that
this right existed!) at the point of a gun.

"The South also had, for all intents and purposes, no cost labor, and there
was criticism even among many capitalists that that was an unfair advantage"
Do you seriously regard an enormous dependent population fit only for farm
labor as an advantage?  Well, we didn't think so in the eighteen seventies.

"for all intents and purposes" and YOU are yelling at ME for "catch
phrases"?  Sure, Rob.

"Catch phrases like 'feel good liberals' are meaningless regarding that time
and that conflict."  No, Rob.  Not at all.  And I emphatically disagree with
your implied assumption that opinions regarding that time are somehow not
held by modern "feel good liberals," whose desire for social sainthood is
unequalled by any past group.  Moderns are the guys writing the histories,
moderns with politically correct agendas held up against and set to reject
any examination, any conclusion, scoring too low on their scale.  You don't
know this?  I can't believe you don't know this.

By what earthly--or unearthly!--standard do you count the Emancipation
Proclamation a successful war measure?  ("the Emancipation Proclamation was
a war measure, and a very successful one")  Nobody rose up and slew the
slave masters. Nothing happened at all. This statement is silly.

And your "Regarding emancipation in the North, it was only an issue in
regard to the loyal border states," needs first a change of idiom: not "in
regard to" but "with regard to," or, better, simply "regarding."  Then "only
an issue" (which suggests that it was less than something larger than an
issue--which makes no sense) should change to "was an issue only with."

Sir, if you believe this "issue" was a neglegible matter, please consider
how your attitude as a "loyal border stater" might have quivered as your
entire livelihood was wiped out, your way of life destroyed, and your family
laid destitute.  I can hear it now, the smug-mouthed better-than-thou folk:
"Well! They brought it on themselves!"    Historians?  Pop those Weasles...!

Let me say now, in the interest of complete disclosure: my great great
grandfather, Warren Hooks, owned a large plantation in northeast Texas
around the town now known as Hooks, Texas; and with this plantation there
were many Negro slaves.  I don't know precisely how many, but a bunch: you
can count the names of black folks now in the North who are named "Hooks."
Those are our boys.  There was a black trombone player here in Chicago named
Frank Hooks who liked to play front line with me; I'd introduce us as the
Hooks boys, Frank and Charlie.  He was quite dark, and we got a lot of
looks.  Truth was, my ancestors probably owned his ancestors.  So..???

Aren't we past all that crap?  Frank and I thought so.

But, hey!  Do you think that someone GAVE Warren Hooks all those slaves?  Do
you think that they did not represent one impressive capital investment? Do
you think that, living in the midst of a slave economy, Warren Hooks should
have risen up above his society and cried out: "Nay, Fellow Texans!  We
shall not do this evil, this cursed blight called "slavery"!  Even though
the Bible tells of slaves even among the "Chosen People of Israel," we here
in north Texas should fall down and pee all over ourselves in expiation of
this dastardly practice!"   Then he should have cut his own throat?

Well, yes, but would that have satiated the blood-thirst of the anti-slavery
folk--read "modern feel-good liberals."  We all know that nothing would.

And nothing will now.

Charlie